W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, a coastal suburb of Dublin, the eldest child of John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen ^[1]. His father had abandoned a career in law to become a portrait painter, a decision that kept the household short of money but saturated it with talk of art, ideas, and skepticism toward conventional religion. His mother came from a prosperous merchant and milling family in Sligo, in the west of Ireland, and the Pollexfen world of ships, quays, and country lore left a deeper mark on the boy than Dublin ever did ^[2].

The family moved repeatedly between Dublin and London during his childhood, and Yeats attended the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and later the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin ^[1]. He was an indifferent student, poor at spelling and mathematics, but he read voraciously and spent long holidays with his Sligo relatives. The countryside around Ben Bulben and Lough Gill, with its fairy legends and local storytellers, became the imaginative territory he mined for decades ^[2].

Rather than follow family tradition to Trinity College, he enrolled at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1884. There he met the poet and mystic George Russell, who shared his fascination with visions and the occult ^[1]. Painting did not hold him. By his early twenties he had committed himself to poetry, and in 1885 his first verses appeared in the Dublin University Review ^[2].

Anyone asking who was W. B. Yeats in the late 1880s would have found a young London-based Irishman assembling folklore anthologies and publishing dreamy, Celtic-flavored verse. His first major collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, appeared in 1889 and drew on Irish heroic legend at a time when few English readers knew the material ^[1]. That same year he met Maud Gonne, a striking English-born Irish nationalist. His long, unreciprocated devotion to her shaped his lyric poetry for the next quarter century; she refused his repeated marriage proposals but remained a presence in his verse into old age ^[3].

Yeats threw himself into organizational work as well as writing. He helped found the Rhymers' Club in London around 1890, joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society, in the same year, and co-founded the Irish Literary Society in London and the National Literary Society in Dublin in 1892 ^[1]. These overlapping circles reflected the twin currents of his early life: esoteric spiritual searching and cultural nationalism. Collections such as The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) established him as the leading voice of what became known as the Celtic Twilight, a phrase taken from his own 1893 book of folklore sketches ^[2].

The decisive turn came through theatre. With Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn he launched the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, an enterprise that evolved into the Abbey Theatre, which opened in Dublin in December 1904 ^[4]. Yeats served as a director, wrote plays for its stage, and defended it through public controversies, including the riots that greeted J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 ^[4]. The Abbey gave the Irish Literary Revival a permanent home and gave Yeats a public role he never relinquished.

Any account of W. B. Yeats achievements has to reckon with an unusual arc: most poets fade after fifty, while Yeats wrote much of his greatest work after that age. The collections Responsibilities (1914), The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), and The Tower (1928) show him stripping away ornament for a harder, plainer, more argumentative style ^[2]. 'Easter, 1916', his response to the Dublin rising and the execution of its leaders, weighed private doubt against public sacrifice in lines that entered Irish political memory. 'The Second Coming' (1919) and 'Sailing to Byzantium' (1927) became touchstones quoted far beyond literary circles ^[1].

In November 1923 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his inspired poetry that gave expression to the spirit of a whole nation ^[5]. He was the first Irish laureate, and the award arrived barely a year after the founding of the Irish Free State, a coincidence Yeats himself noted with pride in his Stockholm lecture, which he devoted to the Irish dramatic movement rather than to his own poems ^[5].

His achievement was not confined to verse. He wrote more than two dozen plays, from The Countess Cathleen (1892) and the nationalist parable Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902, written with Lady Gregory) to spare late dance plays influenced by Japanese Noh drama ^[4]. His prose system-book A Vision (1925, revised 1937), built from his wife's automatic writing, supplied the private symbolism of gyres, phases of the moon, and historical cycles that runs through the late poetry ^[3]. Editors and critics have ranked him, alongside T. S. Eliot, among the defining poets of twentieth-century English, and his Collected Poems remains continuously in print ^[2].

The romantic center of any W. B. Yeats biography is usually Maud Gonne, and with reason, but the fuller story is stranger. After Gonne's husband John MacBride was executed for his part in the 1916 rising, Yeats proposed to her once more and was again refused. In 1917 he proposed to her daughter Iseult, who also declined. In October of that year, at fifty-two, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, a twenty-five-year-old Englishwoman he knew through occult circles ^[3].

The marriage, which surprised his friends, proved durable and productive. Within days of the wedding George (as he called her) began the automatic writing sessions that supplied the raw material for A Vision, and she became his indispensable editor, manager, and steadying presence ^[3]. The couple had two children, Anne, born in 1919, and Michael, born in 1921. Yeats marked Anne's birth with 'A Prayer for My Daughter', written amid the Anglo-Irish War ^[1].

Homes mattered to him as symbols. In 1917 he bought Thoor Ballylee, a Norman tower near Lady Gregory's estate at Coole Park in County Galway, restored it, and made it the emblem of The Tower and The Winding Stair ^[2]. Lady Gregory herself was the most important friendship of his life: patron, collaborator, and anchor. Her death in 1932, and the earlier sale and demolition of the Coole Park house, fed the elegiac strain of his last decade ^[4].

Yeats accepted appointment to the Senate of the new Irish Free State in 1922 and served until 1928 ^[1]. He took the work seriously, chairing the committee that designed the celebrated coinage of the Free State and speaking against the 1925 bill outlawing divorce, in a speech defending the place of the Protestant minority in the new nation ^[6]. Political violence touched him directly: during the Civil War, bullets struck the family home, and a bridge beside Thoor Ballylee was blown up ^[2].

Ill health shadowed the 1930s. He suffered from lung congestion, high blood pressure, and heart trouble, and in 1934 he underwent a Steinach rejuvenation operation, which he credited, whatever its physical effect, with a late surge of creative energy ^[3]. The poems kept coming: The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), the ballads and raging lyrics of New Poems (1938), and the posthumous Last Poems. In these years he also edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) and made combative radio broadcasts for the BBC ^[2].

His politics in this decade have drawn lasting scrutiny. For a few months in 1933 he flirted with the Blueshirt movement, an Irish quasi-fascist group, and wrote marching songs for it before withdrawing in disillusion; scholars continue to debate how deep the attraction ran ^[6]. Wintering abroad for his health, he died on January 28, 1939, at Menton on the French Riviera, and was buried nearby at Roquebrune ^[1]. In September 1948 his remains were brought back to Ireland aboard an Irish naval vessel and reinterred at Drumcliff churchyard in County Sligo, under Ben Bulben, beneath the epitaph he had written for himself in 'Under Ben Bulben' ^[7].

Few poets have been so thoroughly absorbed into a nation's sense of itself. Lines from 'Easter, 1916' and 'September 1913' surface in Irish political speech to this day, and 'The Second Coming' has supplied titles and epigraphs to writers from Chinua Achebe onward ^[2]. W. H. Auden's elegy 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', written weeks after his death, framed the terms in which the twentieth century judged him: a flawed man whose gift survived everything, including his own opinions ^[1].

The institutions he built outlasted him. The Abbey Theatre continues as Ireland's national theatre, and the Yeats International Summer School, founded in Sligo in 1960, still gathers scholars every year ^[4]. The National Library of Ireland holds the largest collection of his manuscripts and mounted a permanent exhibition of his life and work in Dublin ^[8]. Thoor Ballylee operates as a museum, and Sligo has branded itself Yeats Country for visitors tracing the landscapes of the poems.

Scholarship keeps pace with the fame. Richard Ellmann's studies in the 1940s and 1950s set the modern critical framework, and R. F. Foster's authorized two-volume life (1997 and 2003) is widely regarded as the definitive biography ^[6]. Basic W. B. Yeats facts, the Nobel Prize, the Abbey, the Sligo grave, are taught in schools across the English-speaking world, yet the poems resist reduction to a curriculum. He asked to be judged as a maker of well-made things, and on that ground the verdict has held for nearly a century ^[2].